


break your heart to break his bones

by uro_boros



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 03:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uro_boros/pseuds/uro_boros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, he's fifteen when Marco dies. Loss shapes us more than we'd like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	break your heart to break his bones

In his memory, Marco is preserved, forever sixteen and smiling. Jean is fifteen, awkward and angry, grasping desperately at a chance to be safe inside the inner walls. Marco never calls him selfish (even though he is), or stupid (he’s that too). Marco just smiles and says, let’s do it together.

Marco is sixteen and Jean is mourning him. Fifteen is too young for grief, but that’s the selfish part talking. Loss has no age. No one has time for Jean to be fifteen and mourning, so Jean buries the sticky blackness of regret deep in his heart and tries to forget. It hurts—it’s sharp and barbed and it feels too fresh, feels like a kick to his gut. But he hides it, behind friends and shared sorrow and the fear of dying too.

A fifty percent survival rate at fifteen was terrifying. In between being fifteen and burning the body of his friend, it sounds somewhat like relief.

(he thinks grief is sticky because it clings to everything—the barracks where they slept, the dining hall, the training ground, it claws down his throat and chokes him)

—

The great irony, is then, that he lives.

Fifteen slides into sixteen, into eighteen, into twenty-four, into needing glasses for his squint and a rough but real comradeship with Eren. It’s more and more dangerous missions, thinking the window’s getting smaller (because your rate goes up, remember, the longer you’re in, the more likely you are to survive and Jean doesn’t want to survive), before Eren punches him.

"Don’t be an idiot," Eren says, panting. Jean’s right cheek throbs. "Marco wouldn’t have wanted—" he cuts himself off, pained, because there are somethings you don’t talk about.

No one knows what Marco would have wanted. He was sixteen.

It still hurts, sometimes. Because Jean’s grown. Because the world at fifteen is so different than the world at twenty-four (and he can’t think of a world beyond thirty, forty, old and fat with children on his knee), and Marco never got the chance to grow up and find out.

"Fuck," he sobs, feeling like he can’t breathe, pushing the heel of his right hand hard into his eye. "Goddamn you, Jaeger."

Eren stands awkward, but his voice is firm and oddly sympathetic. “Let the dead be dead, Jean.” 

Of all of them, Eren would know best about grief. 

He would also know that Jean can’t.

—

Marco is smiling. 

He holds out his hand, and Jean—tries, he does, he tries so hard to grab it.

And Marco looks sad. He says, let’s do it together, Jean, and half of him is in utter ruin, blood everywhere and exposed bone.

He looks exactly as Jean remembers. Sixteen and dead.

It’s odd how we’re written by our losses and not our victories.


End file.
